Thoughts on Invictus: Part 6

This past semester I taught a class on “Christian Perspectives in Contemporary Culture.” One of the themes the class focused on was justice, not justice in the court system but justice in the economic, political and racial sense—the goal is full reconciliation. I had the class read a work by John Perkins, With Justice for All: A Strategy for Community Development.

Perkins has been a pioneer the establishment of justice in rural Mississippi, an area where racial hatred and oppression survives to this day. In telling the story of his escape to Los Angeles and a better life, his conversion to Christ, and his call back to Mississippi he challenges his brothers and sisters in Christ to take the call for justice seriously as a vital implication of the gospel (a theme which we find prominently in Scripture but which somehow falls pretty much on deaf ears in the American evangelicalism). Perhaps this is because we think of the gospel in terms of witnessing rather than understanding the gospel as being about the inexpressible love of the Father, Son and Spirit for their creation and God’s passionate heart that has accomplished reconciliation through the person of Christ.

As Paul says, “God was in Christ reconciling the world to Himself, not counting people’s trespasses against them, and he has given usthe message of reconciliation.” (2 Cor. 5:19 NET) or as Eugene Peterson puts it in The Message, “God put the world square with himself through the Messiah, giving the world a fresh start by offering forgiveness of sins. God has given us the task of telling everyone what he is doing.”